U.S.

Road To Appeal Gets A Bit More Rocky

By CBSNews.com Staff

April 18, 2000 / 3:13 PM EDT / CBS

The Supreme Court Tuesday issued one ruling making it generally more difficult to appeal convictions by state courts but also ruled in favor of the requests of two inmates on Virginia’s death row.

The first ruling, curtailing federal judges’ power to overturn tainted state convictions and sentences, split the court in a 5 to 4 vote.

Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said federal judges may intercede only if a state court ”arrives at a conclusion opposite to that reached by this court on a question of law” or if the state court ”identifies the correct governing legal principle from this court’s decisions, but unreasonably applies that principle to the facts of the prisoner’s case.”

The ruling potentially affects more than 3,600 people on death row in state prisons across the nation, as well as hundreds of thousands of other prison inmates serving lesser sentences.

The high court at the same voted 6 to 3 to throw out the death sentence of convicted murder Terry Williams and order a new sentencing trial. Williams, who is mildly retarded, was convicted of the 1985 beating death of a Danville, Virginia, man killed while being robbed of his wallet, which contained three dollars. Williams’ court-appointed attorney never informed the jury at the sentencing trial of either Williams’ low intelligence or the circumstances of his childhood, which included beatings and both of his parents being jailed for criminal neglect.

Williams’ new attorney claims he would have received a life prison term instead of the death penalty if the lawyer who represented him at the trial had done a minimally adequate job.

In another ruling Tuesday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled to overturn the sentence of another inmate on death row in Virginia, Michael Wayne Williams. Williams was convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of Mary Elizabeth Keller and the murder of her husband, Morris. Williams came within an hour of being executed last October before the justices agreed to hear his case.

Tuesday’s ruling allows Williams to get a federal court hearing to develop evidence on his claims of juror bias and misconduct by the prosecution.

Those contentions are based on the fact that the jury forewoman at Williams’ sentencing trial did not disclose she had been married to the police officer who investigated the crime scene, and a prosecutor also failed to disclose that he represented the jury forewoman in her divorce.